Space frogs did nothing wrong

stop making bedroom eyes at the banite, goddamnit

bonus whatever the fuck this is:

Words can not describe how infuriating I think it is that Ansur is a part of Wyll's companion mission. It literally has nothing to do with him, but it provides great world building. We learn more about Balduran, legends of Baldur's Gate, and about the Emperor. But we learn NOTHING new about Wyll.

Wyll is also used to connect and introduce new characters. Like Karlach, Mizora, Duke Ravengaurd, Florrick, Duke Stelmane, etc. He just adds a little more backstory to these characters. Besides hearing the strain on his and his father's relationship, we don't learn more about Wyll.

Compare that to Jaheira who also connects and introduces a few characters. It's the other harpers who she leads, her best friend Minsc, and her children. These add world building but let us see and understand Jaheira as a character more.

Also comparing Jaheira and Wyll's stories, Wyll is the "blade of the frontier" but it's mentioned just a bit. While we see Karlach literally fangirl of Jaheira because of the tales of Jaheira. I understand that Jaheira is from the previous games, and she's been a hero for a much longer time. But Wyll is a hero too and known well enough to have a nickname. They should have at least some books or someone at the Grove fangirling over him.

Likely: vampires are sexy and they wanted to make it a sexy character for sales reasons

Vampirism is in there for the sex appeal, I won’t argue with that, but that’s par for the course with vampires. They are meant to be monsters in DND, but I don’t think we lose much by going with the modern trend rather than sticking to the source material quite so religiously. 

As a DND vampire, Astarion literally has to do everything Cazador tells him to, regardless of his own will, thanks to compulsion. If Cazador had just been a power-hungry mortal abuser, then the theme of victimhood explored in Astarion’s character arc would have been very different. Astarion is not a perfect victim. He has committed some pretty heinous acts, some under his own will yes, but importantly a lot of them under Cazador’s control. Because of this, we have to grapple with the idea of autonomy more directly and pick apart what we should and shouldn’t hold him accountable for. During act one, Astarion says that a spawn ‘is less than a slave’, because at least a slave has some kind of autonomy. A spawn has none whatsoever. The dynamics of his vampirism and having a master who literally controls him forces us to grapple with autonomy in a way we wouldn’t have to if compulsion wasn't involved and he wasn’t a vampire. 

There’s the sun, or the lack of the sun, which is something that Astarion laments constantly throughout the game. I don’t think him wanting to escape being a vampire is about self-loathing. I think him wanting to escape being a spawn is about his powerlessness, which can come from self-loathing, but his inclination to solve this is to become a true vampire, not to escape vampirism altogether. And because this ritual would give him access to the sun again, it’s the best of both worlds. The ritual isn’t just about power, it’s about being able to return to a realm he has been expelled from for hundreds of years, the realm of light. The flamboyant, extravagant, colourful Astarion cannot exist in the daylight, and that defines him. It doesn’t make him monstrous, but it is something that can only come from him being a vampire. 

As a life long, die hard vampire fan, I don’t think the hunger for blood is actually that important, particularly in bg3. Astarion is not about morality in the sense of not wanting to feed on people, which is what a lot of vampire stories focus on. And being able to feed on animals, or munch on the plethora of enemies you are killing on the daily, makes it quite easy for him to find sustenance elsewhere, meaning he wouldn’t necessarily be a danger because he’s a bloodsucker. Basically, having to survive on blood doesn’t really hold him back in any meaningful way, and doesn’t really need to in the context of this world. I think the lack of sunlight, of being unable to access a world of light and normalcy, affects him much more. 

And if hunger doesn't matter, why are the spawn a threat? Are the people who fear vampires just bigoted jerks? How is it a dilemma to save these people if they're just victims of circumstance who will do absolutely fine if they just get set free?

The problem is in part that Astarion is the ONLY vampire that gets treated through the romantic rather than monstrous lens, so like... why? Why is he special? If they want vampires to be monsters but only Astarion isn't, then why is he a vampire? Or why not change the rest of the lore to match him? Or if the point is that Cazador drains everyone of empathy through his abuse and getting away allowed Astarion to change... then again, why muddy the waters by having them all be vampires?

If you are a lifelong vampire fan, then I don't need to tell you that vampires come in all shapes and names and allegories, but what brings them all together under the umbrella of "vampire" is blood consumption (or some other way they leech life force — sometimes they steal psychic energy or eat flesh, but more often than not drinking some sort of human fluid is involved. See, prior germ theory being common knowledge, vampires were largely personifications of people's anxieties over disease, be it physical or spiritual, and... I'm going off tangent). If you're not drinking blood, you're some other type of monster — be it a revenant, a mummy, or a lich. All of which do exist in D&D.

I won't go into the weeds of how my eye twitches whenever people say that the "western tradition" of vampires are romantic and aristocratic, because despite my pedantry, I get what people are trying to say. So okay, I agree that D&D vampires are largely inspired by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, but mainly Konami's Castlevania.

[Vampire tangent: Otomezakuro won't be the first to make a statement like that, and they won't be the last. It's not necessarily incorrect, but it does speak to the shallow reference pool people have when defining a vampire, pulling mainly from Hollywood retellings (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA) and seeing that as "western tradition" that overshadows all the varied media and modern interpretations that are available to us.

Arguably, the current portrayals of vampires as seductive outcasts are not unique to the vampire. Rather, the golden age of cinema with all the Universal Studios movie monsters being played by handsome actors signaled an era where monsters get headlining roles. Society, at large, now sees folklore monsters as sympathetic rather than repulsive, whether they be vampires, zombies, or spectres. We now have portrayals of sexy ghosts and fishmen and Frankenstein's monster — that's Hollywood, baby!]

The thing about D&D vampires is that... well, they suck. D&D lore is very comprehensive when it comes to magic systems, planar cosmology, and dragons. But vampirism? You'd get a more layered exploration of vampirism from a young adult novel.

And that's not a knock on D&D. It is Dungeons and Dragons, after all. Not Dungeons and Vampires.

Aside from the standard monster manual, there are two big books that expound on D&D's 5e vampire lore: Curse of Strahd and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. Both of these are set in a plane separate from the main story, making it very much feel like a gothic theme park that players can visit every Halloween rather than something truly integrated into the lore and sociopolitical landscape of Toril.

Strahd is the archetypal D&D vampire, and Ravenloft gives players mechanics on how to play a dhampir. Note that players are expected to play a half-vampire, never a full one — in the same way they cannot be full dragons, orcs, or devils. The traditional TTRPG system simply does not accommodate for vampires as player characters. Imho, any vampire you meet in D&D will feel out-of-place unless they are made as the system intended — as a scary looming threat like Bodhi in BG2.

Because vampires AREN'T seductive outcasts and anti-heros in D&D. They're made to be obsessive stalkers and tyrants like Strahd. They are not a marginalized group that face prejudice (like how Astarion talks about gnomes). They are, canonically, soulless and malevolent.

And I understand Larian's take was to make the monster capable of being more than a monster.... but hoooow? Did the tadpole give Astarion a soul — a very much real and very much important thing in D&D that he should have lost when he died? It never seems to matter that Astarion is, well, undead. Because of D&D's limitations, we are left with questions that Larian didn't answer, like:

How many times does Astarion need to feed? Why is it that he says he's weak when he tries to assault the player character in their sleep, but when you play as him, he's doing it not to satisfy his hunger, but his curiousity?

Why do vampires need to drink blood? If they're undead, then they must be powered by necrotic magic as per D&D rules. How does blood work into that? What happens if they don't drink blood? Do they revert back into inert corpses? Do they need blood to use their magic and abilities? WHY DOES REVIVIFY WORK ON HIM? WHY ARE WE ABLE TO REVIVE A CORPSE BACK TO BEING A WALKING CORPSE?

Exactly how much autonomy did Astarion have as a vampire spawn? He's characterized as both a rebellious mouthy slave but also as someone who is incapable of refusing Cazador's orders. So can he rebel or not? Or can he only loudly complain?

Astarion fans so often define him by his bondage and consider his vampirism as necessary to facilitate said bondage, but like thecubspeaks said, thralldom is not unique to vampires in D&D. In fact, it is so ubiquitous in this setting, we might as well call this Slavery: the TTRPG. Except in this instance, the vampirism only muddles the degree of his complicity instead of painting a clearer picture as to the circumstances of his servitude, because vampiric thralldom is not as defined in this setting as, say, psionic or magical thralldom.

The Emperor and Astarion basically have the same conceit of evil creatures now being free from doing the evil bidding of their evil overlord, but in the Emperor's case, we know that Mindflayers are a hivemind and that's how they operate. For Astarion, we might as well know jack about the specifics. (And I'm of the opinion Larian wanted it to remain vague because they're a big fan of letting players fill in the blanks and never committing to any lore decision.)

This is all to say D&D is a poor medium to tell vampire stories. Astarion, as a vampire, would be better served by being in any other multiverse because his schtick is inherently handicapped by his source material. Yes, you can get his story better elsewhere, and it has been done better elsewhere. Plop Astarion into Vampire: the Dark Ages and he won't have to deal with any of the confusing questions above.

Big sword womn </3

Gortash is just as awful as Orin is, he just hides it! (I was going to say he hides it better but the difference is he's trying to hide it at all, while Orin doesn't care about that.) Sure, he can make himself come off as reasonable when proposing an alliance, he can tut about how chaotic Orin is (nevermind that causing chaos is literally her role in the plan) and appeal to the player over a shared desire to fix things. But he's also having bombs put in toys for refugee children. He's working his slave workforce to exhaustion, never mind that it makes them less productive as long as they're suffering. He performs "experiments" to see how many body parts he can amputate before his prisoners die, and how much he has to torture children for their parents to sacrifice their lives to save them. The difference between Orin and Gortash is that she calls her violence art, while he calls his scientific experimentation. Sure, it sounds more rational, but his victims end up just as gruesomely dead.

And Orin literally tells you Gortash is a liar. Before you even meet him, she says, "his throat spits lies, but my blade carves the truth." Orin never denies her violence. Even when she disguises herself, it's never for more than a minute--she's incredibly honest, for a changeling. Gortash's goal from the beginning is to manipulate you. Sure, he can ally with you, but only if you pass his "test", and just because he thinks you're useful enough not to hurt, it doesn't mean he's going to stop torturing the gondians or stop his steel watchers committing police brutality.

baldur's gate 3 epilogue:

player: so what have you been doing with all that power wyll?

grand duke wyll ravengard: oh I've been pressuring the generationally wealthy into funding long-term no-strings-attached social housing for refugees and homeless people

ascended astarion: he's actually really good at his job

grand duke wyll ravengard: yeah I'm actually really good at my job. but it's bad to have total power so I've actually made 3 more titles of equal power to me in order to not have a dictatorship

ascended astarion: genuinely I can't lie I haven't been able to do anything evil because wyll's so good at his job. this profane ascension shit was useless.